Liam Taylor's blog

This is a talk given by Liam Taylor of the Camp for Climate Action at the session on "Radical democracy and imagination" hosted by Real Change at the Compass conference on Saturday. The views expressed here are his own.  

I must admit that I feel like something of an anomaly at this conference. Before coming here today I looked on the Compass website at the impressive list of speakers that are here: people from think tanks, from policy institutes, from NGOs, journalists, elected politicians. In other words, people who might be considered ‘experts', people who do politics for their day job.
 
And I want to begin by immediately renouncing any claims to such expertise on my part. I probably know less about some of these issues than anybody else in this room. I don't spend my days reading policy papers for a living; instead, I spend my days teaching secondary schoolchildren in east London. But I think the fact that I am here, and that my presence here feels slightly anomalous, tells us something interesting about politics, and in particular the way that our politics has become increasingly professionalized. That, I think, is a problem - and it goes to the heart of our thinking about radical democracy in this discussion here today. 
 
Climate Camp, I want to suggest, is the antithesis of professionalized politics. We are not an NGO, with a full-time staff; we are not a political party, with appointed leaders. We are a group of ordinary people, from all walks of life, who have come together because of our shared concern about climate change, and our desire to do something about it. Each year, we set up a week-long camp next to one of the root causes of climate change, from power stations to airports, culminating in some form of direct action. In the past we've camped outside Drax coal-fired power station; outside Heathrow airport; and, last year, outside the coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Most recently, on 1 April, thousands of people converged on Bishospgate in the City of London for a day-long camp outside the European Climate Exchange, the world's largest carbon trading centre. It's not just about protest: it's about building our little vision of the future, in the here and now, a vision which we develop through workshops and education, through sustainable living, and through the day-to-day practices of direct democracy.